First International Workshop on Artificial Consciousness

Artificial Consciousness

Taormina, Italy, September 2-6, 2013 at ECAL 2013

About this Workshop

The workshop is devoted to the issue of artificial consciousness. In biological organisms, consciousness is considered to be the starting point for personal human understanding of the world and consequent intelligent behaviour. Therefore, if one is interested in cognitive architectures which would be biologically inspired, then modeling of consciousness becomes an important computational research topic for the construction of architectures that are strive to have equivalence with the human mind. Furthermore, both life and consciousness can be seen as emerging processes with unique properties and a particular elusive character from the point of view of scientific study.

This workshop might be an excellent opportunity to review and advance the research programs focused on finding the common grounds and relationships between life and consciousness. The workshop will provide an overview of the state of the art in the field of machine consciousness. Moreover, it is intended to include contributions from designers of artificially conscious machines. Such contributions address the problem of how a given cognitive architecture should be shaped in order to include the feeling of being aware of something. It will be argued that the knowledge about the qualitative side of consciousness “supervenes” upon the functional knowledge. In other words, if our knowledge is good enough to approach the design of machines with conscious states it is also able to explain the causes of phenomenology in a general sense.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

– computational architectures on machine consciousness

– ethics of artificial consciousness

– methods of defining and recognising the presence of artificial qualia

– setting up a Turing Test for artificial qualia

The First International Workshop on Artificial Consciousness is part of the 12th European Conference on Artificial Life. Designing, Programming, Evolving, Simulation and Synthesis of Natural and Artificial Living Systems (September,2-6 2013, Taormina, Italy).

Call for papers

We invite the submission of papers on the topics of workshop. Submit your research by June 23, 2013 to be considered for the workshop program. Submission is made through the Easychair website. The submitted papers should be no more than 3 pages long (no more than 1000 words). The papers must be prepared for blind referee, with all self-reference and personal data suppressed.